I ferment in a fridge with a temp controller. Lately the controller has been switched to heat mode, and it's been holding at 66.

I have an IPA with WLP051 (66-70) on day 20. Last night I put a starter of WLP005 (67-74) into the fridge on my new magnetic stir plate. When I got home today, the temp in the fridge was 76. My heater had not been on, but it turns out that the stir plate generates a fair amount of exhaust heat on its own.

My starter didn't smell like beer yet, in fact it smelled kind of funny. Not bad, just not what my starters usually smell like. But, the probe for my temp controller was taped onto the IPA bucket. So 76 was the temp of the beer, not the ambient temp of the fridge. I have since switched the controller to cool, and it's back to temp.

Cool, thanks. It couldn't have been that high for more than a few hours, by my estimate.

The starter is second generation, from a washed culture. I was planning to drop it into a 1.076 IPA tomorrow. 74 is the top of the temp range, so it wasn't that far off. My concern is that I may have stressed the yeast at a time when they were particularly vulnerable. I usually target the low end of the yeast's temp range.